KDDI and Okinawa Cellular are pleased to announce that subscribers to their 'EZ Machi Uta' service exceeded 1 million on March 22 [1].

EZ Machi Uta, a service that enables subscribers to set their favorite music or the voices of celebrities and animation characters as ring tones that can be heard by callers to their au phone, launched in February 2005. Users can not only set the same sound for all callers, but also set separate sounds for specific callers, dates, times, and days of the week. Not only callers from mobile phones [2] are greeted with EZ Machi Uta ringtones, but callers from landline services such as KDDI's or NTT's can also hear EZ Machi Uta. There are currently 60 sites [3] that support EZ Machi Uta for au phones, offering about 60,000 tracks, primarily the latest J-POP hits.

KDDI will continue in its efforts to enhance this service, so that even more customers can use EZ Machi-uta.

[1]

This is the figure for subscribers to the EZ Machi Uta optional service (105 yen per month).

[2]

From SoftBank Mobile and Tu-Ka mobile phones, voices of celebrities and animation characters can be heard, but not music content.